A few days ago I was crossing e-swords on a newspaper website with wind turbine enthusiasts. The debate came up because the government is said to be thinking about reducing the subsidies offered to those who erect the giant windmills.

My problem with wind turbines is that they are intermittent at the best of times and, because you can’t rely on the electricity they generate, you still have to have conventional gas-fired power stations on standby. At the end of last year, for example, during the extra-harsh cold snap, the UK’s turbines fell silent for days as windless weather settled over the country.

So I posed a question to those on the newspaper forum whose thinking on the matter did not extend much past ‘just build more wind turbines’.

‘Who’ I asked ‘wants their local hospital connected to a wind turbine?’

‘Lots of people!’ one blogger improbably claimed. The point I was trying to make was that the electricity generated - when the wind is blowing - is tricky stuff to deal with. It’s very hard to store and you can’t attach the wind turbine to anything critical. These fundamental issues seem to have gone over the heads of the theorists and academics that pack out the environmental debate in the UK.

I asked my opponent whether he had heard of the wind turbine E-gas project currently being ramped in Germany. He hadn’t and asked for ‘a link the relevant academic papers’. Which just about sums up the theoretical approach to green technology in the UK with the approach of engineering-led Germany.

The E-gas project looks to be brilliant way of effectively storing the energy generated by the offshore wind turbines. The first stage is to use the electricity to ‘crack’ seawater into its component parts of Hydrogen and Oxygen.

It would be possible to store and ship the hydrogen for use in fuel cell-powered cars, but the E-gas project takes this a step further by creating artificial methane gas by adding Co2 to the Hydrogen. This process is called Methanation, where the Hydrogen is thermo-chemically bonded with the Carbon Dioxide and the only by-product is water.

Audi started experimenting with E-gas way back in January 2001 and now, with the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research (ZSW) in Stuttgart and the Frauenhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Tech­nology (IWES), it is running a live production plant which expects to make around 150 tonnes of gas.

Although the E-gas can be pumped directly into the domestic grid, Audi says the 150 tonnes of gas can power 1500 of the prototype A3 TCNG models around 9300 miles per year. The VW Group has had the vision to see that gas - both of the renewable and fossil varieties - is a big part of our future energy use.

Indeed, the new Golf-family MQB platform is designed to accommodate gas tanks, making gas-powered versions of all sorts of cars from Polo to Passat size possible. Indeed, the production version of the new A3 TCNG will arrive in late 2013.

As usual, while the ideological arguments and starry-eyed predictions bog down the issue of sensible deployment of wind turbines in the UK, Germany is a decade ahead in the renewable energy game.

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But the problem is its only Germany that can afford this type of technology. Renewable energies cost as much as nuclear. And this is the same Germany that has cancelled all its nuclear programmes, because of a 1 in a million combined tsunami / earthquake, 10,000 miles away. Surely a knee jerk reaction. And apart from that we can't all be German, nor do we wish to be. (The Pope's German)

Out of curiosity, what possible benefit is gained by adding the CO2 into the process to create methane (itself a quite potent greenhouse gas, far more so than CO2 itself) other than to claim some form of carbon capture? It certainly provides little benefit over hydrogen, which can be used either in fuel cells to create further electricity or to fuel cars directly (ICEs have been converted to run on hydrogen with some promising results). Using methane to power cars is hardly a step forward - it was fairly commonplace during the Second World War when petrol was rationed - and will do nothing to address the elephant in the room that is transport's need to reduce its contribution to climate change. I'm all for the use of wind turbines to produce hydrogen, but further converting it into methane seems a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

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The thing is it has now been worked out that gas fired powerstations are cheaper to build and run then wind turbines as wind turbines do not generate all the time and are subject to huge subsidies . Any power station could be used in low peak times to create hydrogen from water and yes converting that hydrogen H2 to methane CH6 is eminently sensible as H2 has such small molecules they leak out of any storage vessel where as methane does not .

The UK has only one Hyrogen filling station and that is at the Honda works in Swindon so we are well behind the game (as usual ) on alternative means of propulsion . Seems there are plenty of alternatives for fuelling vehicular travel but air travel is another matter entirely .

There is an interesting article in the telegraph about hydrogen for fuel in cars in todays daily telegraph .

Not sure what Hilton means by "ideological arguments" and" starry-eyed predictions," other than the Westminster parliament cannot stick to a policy for more than a week, lost without Murdoch's empire to give it guidance.

Ideological refers to one political party hooked onto nuclear power, therefore any diminution in subsidies for alternative sources of power makes the nuclear case all the stronger.

Incidentally, it is fair to point out VW's ambitions, indeed the entire German car industry, rests entirely on the rest of the world buying its vehicles and products. The German economy thrives on massive exports. If we stopped buying German cars ....

One further observation, Hilton appears to have lost a debate in one website but brings it here to air, a case of rerunning it talking to your self to win it after getting soundly beaten.

True, the dismission of the German nuclear plants over the next years has been a strong reaction and it's giving them some issues. They have an increasing cost of energy now, also due to large investments in alternative energies. But just like the austerity programs they endured at the beginning of the 2000s, it will make them stronger in the future.

There may be some place for this technology, but I feel that it is ignorant to dismiss Hydrogen out of hand. Intermittent windpower can be hooked up to an electrolyser (already available) to make hydrogen. Electrolysers can work off an intermittent source like sloar or wind to produce stored hydrogen, which can then be used to fuel vehicles or pieped into the gas grid. Remember, the gas grid can take up to 15% Hydrogen which can then be used for domestic use.

While methane may be easier to use in current technology, using Hydrogen in a fuel cell is extremely efficient so you can use much less of it. The Germans are planning to roll out a huge network of Hydrogen filling stations. The electrolyser filling stations can be anywhere that has access to electricity (wind, solar, mains or whatever). So, the argument about transporting Hydrogen doesn't really stack up.

I think that most of what we read about global warming is rubbish and that propaganda seems to have taken over from reasoned argument (or scientific fact) on both sides. Pragmatically speaking, we need to get away from reliance on Middle Eastern oil and Russian gas. This problematic reliance will be solved by scientists and engineers in the fields of Nuclear, Coal, Natural Gas and Hydrogen rather than the talking shop of environmental science....

As well as not generating power when there is no wind, turbines also generate no electricity when there is too much wind! They cant cope with the increased loads and risk overheating and are therefore shutdown.

As if this wasn't enough, when this happens the owners of the turbines are compensated for having to turn them off, receiving the subsidies they could expect if they had been left running.

Unfortunately I cant link to the article I am quoting as it's behind the times paywall.